SDSU WILL FIND OUT MUCH AND QUICKLY

Wooden Legacy will provide quality test

Aztecs vs. College of Charleston

Today: 5:30 p.m. at Titan Gym, Fullerton.

On the air: ESPNU; 1090-AM

San Diego State coach Steve Fisher goes way back with Arnie Sgalio, the events coordinator for ESPN’s series of nonconference basketball tournaments each November and December. Four years ago, he called Sgalio and booked the Aztecs into the 2012 Diamond Head Classic in Honolulu and the 2013 Anaheim Classic.

Four years later, two things have changed.

The Anaheim Classic merged with the Wooden Classic to form the DirecTV Wooden Legacy. And what was considered a nice, solid, middling but hardly overwhelming tournament is suddenly loaded.

“I thought it would be pretty good,” Fisher said. “Maybe I didn’t know it would be this good. … I’ve looked at the field and then looked at some of the other events that are going on now, and I do believe that ours could hold up against all of them.”

It’s a diplomatic way of saying that we’ll find out a lot about his basketball team in a short amount of time.

The Aztecs (2-1) open the eight-team tournament today at Cal State Fullerton’s 4,000-seat Titan Gym against College of Charleston. The Cougars return four starters from a team that went 24-11 — 11-2 away from home — and won at Baylor in the first round of the
CBI.com postseason tournament.

The next night it’s either Arizona State or Creighton. ASU is 6-0, including wins at UNLV and against No. 25 Marquette. Creighton is 4-0, ranked No. 20 and has national player of the year candidate Doug McDermott.

One of those four — SDSU, C of C, ASU, Creighton — will wake up Saturday morning with back-to-back losses. Two others will be 1-1.

Said Creighton coach Greg McDermott: “Really, there isn’t much weakness on our side of the bracket whatsoever.”

In all, six of the eight teams won 22-plus games last season and reached the postseason. Of the other two, one (George Washington) is 4-0 and the other (Cal State Fullerton) gets to play on its home floor for the first two rounds.

“This is going to be good for us for a lot of reasons,” said Fisher, whose team has played only three times, and one of those was against NAIA San Diego Christian. “We’ll play a lot of games quickly and guys will get playing time. But it’s an important three games to say: OK, now we’ve got some résumé fillers and builders that we’ve done a good job against. Or it will say: Boy, we’ve got a lot of work to do.

“One of the two.”

Combine the Wooden Legacy with SDSU’s next two games — at USD on Dec. 5 and home vs. Washington on Dec. 8 — and you could make a strong case that this is the most important stretch of the nonconference season, and maybe the entire season.

The thinking: The Mountain West, so far, has yet to record a signature victory as a conference and likely won’t have the gaudy RPI that regularly is rewarded with four or five NCAA Tournament berths. Instead, we could be looking at a two- or three-bid league, which significantly narrows your margin of error during an 18-game conference schedule.

Emerging from this five-game stretch with two or three losses narrows it even further.

“Especially with the media and guys on Twitter and everything,” sophomore Winston Shepard said, “it’s kind of hard to not be aware of that.”

The good news for the Aztecs is that Fisher’s teams have traditionally thrived in situations with multiple games in rapid succession. In their last nine nonconference “exempt” events, they have gone undefeated five times and lost just once in the other four. And they’ve reached the semis or final in the last six Mountain West conference tournaments.

You need good, fit athletes to do that. You need a deep bench. You also need a veteran coaching staff that works well on no sleep to install a scouting report in a hotel ballroom just hours before the next game.

If the Aztecs beat College of Charleston, they’ll learn their Friday assignment — ASU or Creighton — at about 10:30 tonight. They’ll tip off 20 hours later.

Notable

James Johnson sat out much of the last two practices with a knee injury, but Fisher said he expects him to suit up today. Freshman guard D’Erryl Williams, who missed last week’s game against San Diego Christian with an ankle injury, has practiced all week. … SDSU has won 42 straight nonconference games against unranked opposition in the regular season. The last such loss: Dec. 19, 2009, at Arizona State … About 320 of the 345 Division I teams have played more games than SDSU so far this season … This is the first meeting vs. C of C.